We learned how to create fancy return address labels with LibreOffice in our last installment. Today we’re going to tackle mail merge. Mail merge is a powerful, time-saving word processor feature for addressing mass-mailings and form letters. It’s easy but a little weird in LibreOffice, so follow along and learn how to be a mail merge guru.

Address Labels and Form Letters.

If you’re not familiar with LibreOffice, it is a superior offshoot of the popular free office suite OpenOffice. LibreOffice is cross-platform and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows, and provides a word processor, database, spreadsheet, drawing program, and slideshow creator. With LibreOffice you can create address labels and form letters. It all starts with your database of addresses, and then following the not-very-intuitive steps to merge your addresses into your document. This is not well-documented in the LibreOffice help documents, and if you try to figure it out yourself you’ll get lost. So follow along and learn the right way– it’s an easy few steps when you know how. If you don’t have an address database, you don’t have to be a guru to create one because we’ll show how to do that too.

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